Students turn writing into a labor of love

Teaching students to write can stump even the best teachers. Middle-school students assigned essays often turn in disorganized summaries. Elementary students assigned fiction turn in rewritten "Harry Potter."

"You get this writing that's all over the place and you're like, 'Why aren't they doing what I tell them to do?' " said Artise Burton, a language-arts teacher at Mercer Middle School in Seattle. "Then I realized, I didn't really tell them to do anything."

A new method of teaching writing is making a huge difference in several Seattle schools. Teachers using the Writers Workshop system teach a 10- to 15-minute "mini-lesson" on a single strategy or topic, followed by 30 or 40 minutes of writing, every day. Students choose their own topics. Teachers participate, too, working their way through the process of writing.

The results: Second-graders in Tamra Hauge's class at Lowell Elementary actually cheer when it's time for a writing lesson. Middle-school hallways traditionally reserved for artwork are plastered with essays, poetry and stories. And kids who previously weren't crazy about writing are filling notebook after notebook with thoughtful prose.

"In fourth or fifth grade, I just wrote summaries," said Ericka Armstead, a Mercer seventh-grader in her second year of the Writers Workshop. She's improved her use of dialogue, deftly deciding how much to give away to her readers as she reveals her characters.

"You can put in actions so people can see it and feel it," she said.

Writers Workshop is a Columbia University Teachers College program that has been successful in New York schools for decades. Seven Seattle middle schools began using the program last year with the help of Nesholm Family Foundation and Alliance for Education grants.

This year, every K-8 and middle school is involved at some level, and the district funded training and materials for four elementary schools. Other schools are participating in training, and there are plans to expand it across the district — a $1.5 million to $2 million expense. Some teachers flew to New York for training, and Teachers College experts give regular demonstrations to teachers at participating schools. Several schools have hired writing coaches.

"I think we have to figure out how to afford to keep it going, because it's having an incredibly powerful effect on our kids," said Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson.

The magic of the program, teachers say, is that kids are invested in their topics.

"It's really empowering for kids to write about things they care about," said Gretchen Coe, a sixth-grade teacher at Mercer. "All of a sudden, it's like who you are is worth writing about and your life is worth writing about."

The youngest kids in the program write a lot of short works. As they get older, the assignments get more complex and require more revision.

At Lowell, McKenna Taylor, 8, wrote a book about sleepovers. It's an "all-about book," which means it's short on opinions, long on specific instructions. All the essentials are there: whom to invite, sleepover manners, how to fall asleep if your friends are being noisy.

Fifth-grader Gabriel Braun wrote a personal essay about what happens after death. In the essay, he writes that he agrees with John Lennon that there is nothing after death, but he explores the beliefs of various faiths.

His classmate, Fiona Boardman, wrote about her Shetland sheepdog, Freddy. He's always there for her, and that makes him a great pet, she wrote.

Their topics are different, but both fifth-graders are learning how to organize their work around a thesis statement and topic sentences, and how to strengthen their essays with such stylistic additions as lists and repetition.

In some cases, particularly at the middle-school level, kids tackle intense and personal topics in their writing, sharing difficult experiences and forging relationships with their teachers.

At Mercer, seventh-grader Matthew Todd is writing about how brand-name clothes can change the way people behave. A sixth-grader in Coe's class is writing an essay entitled: "My dad ain't a real man."

Cristopher Mayo, 12, recalled a funny tale he wrote about a shoddily constructed fort that collapsed on him. Telling the story required dialogue — one of his strengths, he said — but he also had to learn to use description, inner-thinking and action. Each element was the topic of a mini-lesson.

"You never look at a child in the same way after you read their writing," said Susan Toth, the writing coach and assistant principal at Mercer. "You look at a child and you think, 'that's the child who went to Kenya and accidentally shot her uncle in the bottom.' "

Emily Heffter: 206-464-8246 or eheffter@seattletimes.com

The information in this article, originally published January 3, 2008, was corrected January 5, 2008. Lowell Elementary School third grader Alexandra Meredith's last name was misspelled in a previous version of this story.